Enterprise application servers may implement a service-oriented architecture (“SOA”) and are often utilized by businesses to deliver application services. SOA is a strategy that organizes the discrete functions contained in enterprise applications into interoperable, standards-based services that may be combined and reused to meet business needs. Such application servers may be distributed to handle a large number of transactions and may provide mission-critical systems, including core banking services, airline reservations, brokerage services, e-commerce operations, and telecom services. Tuxedo® Service Metadata, used by Oracle Tuxedo®, contains information pertaining to services available in a Tuxedo® Domain.
In the case of Service Component Architecture (“SCA”), a set of specifications is used that describe a model for building applications and systems using SOA. SCA extends and complements prior approaches to implementing services, builds on open standards such as web services and encourages an SOA organization of business application code based on components that implement business logic. SCA relies on a composite file defined in Service Component Definition Language (“SCDL”) that can describe a service provided by such a component. Tuxedo® Service Metadata and SCA differ in both philosophy and programming model and data in a Tuxedo® Metadata Repository typically cannot be used by a SCA server to access services. To access a Tuxedo® service from a SCA client or to access a SCA component from a Tuxedo® server typically requires knowledge not only of Tuxedo®, but also of the SCA framework, with its tedious Extensible Markup Language (“XML”)-based composite and component files.